Intent on solving privacy concerns for tomorrow’s financial landscape, the privacy-preserving layer-1 blockchain enables businesses and consumers to reap the benefits of a public network for an array of financial applications compliant with legal requirements
You've waited long enough. Dusk Network, the Amsterdam-based FinTech company, successfully launched its testnet called DayBreak today; allowing you, our Dusk community members, and the wider blockchain community, to interact with the network for the first time. With the launch of DayBreak, the public can interact with the network for the first time.
Dusk Network is a layer-1 blockchain protocol capable of powering privacy-preserving smart contracts that satisfy business compliance criteria. The network is secured by a novel and fast Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus with settlement finality guarantees, an important requirement for financial use cases. This opens up new opportunities for communities and organizations who are looking to embrace blockchain for their business and use it to address the inefficiencies of traditional finance.
Compliance and a real-world solution
Traditional financial institutions, such as banks or brokers, are keeping a watchful eye on the rapid developments in the blockchain industry. Blockchain has the potential to disrupt the status quo, but only if it can comply with the financial market directives and legislation.
Carving its own path, Dusk Network was designed and built from the ground up to satisfy the requirements of a regulatory compliant distributed ledger. The team pushed the boundaries of the current technology by researching and delivering novel techniques and algorithms in the realm of peer-to-peer networking, distributed computation, and zero-knowledge cryptography. By tailoring its network specifically to the requirements of the financial sector, Dusk Network aims to make blockchain relevant in promising sectors currently largely untapped.
”Most of us know that public blockchains are completely transparent by nature. This presents a real blocker for large financial institutions looking to adopt the technology. They need the tools to satisfy compliance criteria, whilst keeping sensitive data, such as their clients’ balances, ownership registries, and asset movements between venues, confidential. I am beyond excited to launch DayBreak knowing that we are pushing technology that addresses the needs of the real world.” - says Jelle Pol, Founder & Business Director at Dusk Network.
Technological breakthroughs
By utilizing PLONK, the lightning-fast standard in zero-knowledge (ZK) technologies, all transactions on Dusk Network benefit from confidentiality. The network acts as a public record with smart contracts that store relevant information in a confidential fashion, thus solving the shortcomings of similar platforms, such as Ethereum, which are incapable of fulfilling the privacy-compliance requirement.
Succinct Attestation is a unique Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism that delivers much-needed settlement finality. This is essential for regulatory compliance in financial applications. On Dusk Network, completed transactions are final and irreversible as soon as they are processed, providing legal certainty of ownership. In addition, PoS is more environmentally friendly than Proof-of-Work, as it doesn’t rely on the power-intensive computation of mining.
The Confidential Smart Contract platform RUSK opens up development of a new breed of powerful decentralized applications (dApps) and enables anyone to program privacy-enabled smart contracts. This sets Dusk Network aside from existing privacy blockchains such as Monero and Zcash, which can only cater private transactions due to the lack of smart contract functionality.
These three technological innovations allow for privacy, instant settlement finality, and smart contract functionalities, making it possible to service regulatory-compliant financial applications on blockchain technology.
“TestNet is a huge milestone and I am incredibly proud of launching a network that fulfills a vision that many considered too ambitious even for multi-billion dollar projects With Dusk Network we are creating a state-of-the-art blockchain in every sense of the word; the components underpinning the network such as PLONK, Kadcast, and Rusk are true marvels of innovation that pave the way for a new standard in both traditional finance as well as the emerging DeFi. With the delivery of DayBreak, we are entering an exciting new chapter which signals our confidence in the network’s capabilities, as well as our readiness to progress to the next steps featured in our roadmap, toward our vision of a truly fair and efficient financial market.” - says Emanuele Francioni, Founder and Technical Director at Dusk Network.
Testnet DayBreak & beyond
With its launch, the network is now open for public scrutiny. Users can visit the Block Explorer to inspect the network's block times, and learn more about the ongoing activities. Those who are looking to contribute can apply for the waiting list, which is currently boasting over 2500 sign-ups. Tech-savvy users can install the CLI wallet from the Portal and start executing transactions on the network.
After the launch of our testnet, we remain committed to improving the network and incorporating the feedback we receive from the community and through extensive testing of its many components in a real-world environment. This is why we’ll be instituting release cycles as we move forward; to continuously deliver upgrades of all Dusk ecosystem libraries and components with a stream of releases publicly shared on our Github repositories. The upgrades will be then pushed on DayBreak along with the overall feature progression and stability enhancement, so to deliver constant and tangible improvements for every user trying out the network Stay tuned for these reports as they're released!
We'd like to thank you all for your patience, and introduce you to DayBreak, our most significant milestone yet.